Windows Azure Compute Services Go Down in Western Europe

Hot on the heels of the Google Talk outage comes news of a Microsoft Azure failure in Western Europe. This outage affects compute services for public and private cloud enterprise deployments, so could be a lot worse for businesses if it continues or cascades.

Not So Blue Skies

In a bad day for all things cloud, Microsoft's troubles started before lunch in western Europe with customer's virtual servers being knocked offline by a failure in the Azure Compute data center. In response, Microsoft issued a statement, "We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region."

An update since makes the usual "we're working on it" noises, but there seems to be no word of a rapid resolution for affected users. This outage comes hot on the heels of the Google Talk outage, which is more widespread, from India to America, and is generating all the news today.

Please Standby...

Azure has suffered several issues, with the "leap day" outage back in February/March causing the company to compensate some customers. Looking through Microsoft's service dashboard, it has seen quite a few wobbles recently too:

Expect more news on this story as it develops, particularly, if the service outage is preventing customers from seeing their services or data. Please let us know if you're suffering from this outage, and what effect it is having.

Update: CMSWire was contacted by a Microsoft spokesperson who gave us the following information:

"The recent Windows Azure service interruption in the Western Europe sub-region has been resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may have caused our customers. The duration of the service interruption was approximately 2.5 hours and was resolved at 6:33 AM PDT. Customers who have questions regarding this incident are encouraged to contact Customer Service and Support."

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